Friday, November 11, 2011

Another Weekly Amalgamation of PKD Reading (This week with Listening!)

We have yet to hear even the rickety ignition sequence of Philip K Dick Article Machine, but I imagine it's coming out of mothballs this weekend with the release of The Exegesis last Tuesday. There are two reviews of the book at Amazon already, both of which are positive. Slate published a nice excerpt here. It's from earlier on in the text and is part of a letter.

Annotator and Afterword author of The Exegesis, Rich Doyle posted his talk, Stairway to Eleusis, about PKD here.

The Science Channel is premiering a new series, Prophets of Science of Fiction, and one of the upcoming episodes is about Philip K Dick, and it looks, from the screengrab they are providing as a publicity still that Philip K Dick will be played by a re-purposed, animatronic Abraham Lincoln, with a cheap, fake beard. Don't believe me?:

15 comments:

Great post, and thanks as always for the plug. Should we start a Kickstarter to try and convince the PKD Estate to publish the whole Exegesis as an ebook? Or handsomely printed multi-volume set? PKD had his Encyclopedia Brittanica...

Speaking of syncronicity, I was just this week writing about Wash-35, _Now Wait for Last Year_ and checking Sutin for confirmation of a connection. Nice to see someone else made the link 30 years earlier!

Thanks for the link; I was flipping through the Exegesis and that page stuck out to me, so I read it and found it so fascinating, I had to comment.

I'm expecting to write posts throughout my reading, as I think a few others will be. With 100,000 copies I think we will find many interesting pieces on him popping up on the net. I am curious to see all the different takes we get.

And to Mr. Hand -- it would be nice, wouldn't it, though I can expect it would be difficult to sort it all out. Of course, I think it is more likely than the Tolkien estate letting Tolkien's diaries be published.

Thanks for the nod concerning the kickstarter project. I read your post shortly after you posted and totally missed my mention. I would like the PKD community to know, that I don't take my situation lightly. I'm somewhat different in that I didn't know of Phil prior to the synchronous event on 6-23-3002. I didn't know of his own mystical experiences. Then I began to have my own "anamnestic" experiences that were localized to two distinct moments in my life. At ages 12 and 15 I had two revelatory experiences. Summer of 86 (I was 12) I had a vision of myself in the TV as if one had a camcorder behind me at an angle. At 15 music gravitated from my cassette player to beneath my bed. It was the chorus to "This could be the night". I've had no other visions or "hallucinations" if you'd like to call them that, but a lot of fuzzy memories about some of Phil's books. And a lot of synchronicity and deja vu after 6-23-2002.

I'll probably order the Exegesis on Sunday. Not sure if I should, but it's possible my memoir could be incomplete without it.

I'm thrilled to see that somebody has already picked up on the Flow/king/Hamlet thing. When I was reading through that stuff I knew that some enterprising young grad student would find much grist for the Masters' dissertation mill there!

I like what Rich Doyle says in his talk about pain being something that's present in a lot of shamanic initiations. It's an important part of the explanation of Dick's Altered States experiences that doesn't get as much press as the drugs or mysticism. And I'd argue that our own David Gill is one of the sharpest scholars tuned in to the pain of PKD.

Yes, I think there is a good possibility we will get much more of the Exegesis. I wouldn't be surprised, though, if some of it ends up not being published, if for no other reason, it would be too difficult to publish in any form.

I distinctly remember the press release a year ago stated that the Exegesis would be published in two volumes, with the second volume to be published a year from now. Anyone know if that's still the case? This one sure doesn't have "Vol. 1" on it anywhere...